The Smoke-Scented Girl

by Melissa McShane

  “Not until a few hours after sunrise, unfortunately.”

  “Doesn’t traveling all day interfere with your examination of our favorite research subject?”

  “Don’t call her that, Piercy.”

  “I was hoping to lighten the mood. My apologies. Well, doesn’t it?”

  “I can read and ride just as well as I can read and walk at the same time. I’ve copied out every rune I could see, so it really is a matter of figuring out where the secret is hiding.” Evon blew on his fingers. “I’m for bed, though I’m too keyed up to sleep, I think.”

  “You could ask Kerensa to tell you another story.”

  “I can hardly bear to meet her eyes, I’m keeping so many secrets from her.”

  “She needs to know there’s a possibility you might be dragged away,” Piercy said. “Imagine the shock that would be.”

  Evon grimaced. “You’re right. I’ll go talk to her. Are you going to bed?”

  “I’m going to have a drink in the taproom first. I’ll be up shortly.”

  Kerensa’s room was down the hall from theirs, and Evon missed the convenience of their all being in close quarters. Mrs. Petelter had posted a guard outside Kerensa’s room and two more on a rotation below her window. Evon would have been more grateful for this if he hadn’t suspected that Mrs. Petelter had made the arrangements the way she might have planned security for a valuable museum exhibit. He passed the guard, who didn’t so much as look at him, and rapped on the door. “It’s me,” he said in response to her query, and let himself in.

  Kerensa was standing next to the window, looking down. “They aren’t very subtle,” she said, and Evon went to her side to see two men in Home Defense cloaks and hats moving in a regular pattern from one end of the inn to the other. She wasn’t yet dressed for bed, though her hair was loose and she held a brush in one hand. Her hair gleamed warm gold in the lamplight and Evon was seized with a brief, irrational urge to touch it, to see if it felt like hair or flowing metal. He closed his fist on the impulse.

  “I was about to come find you,” Kerensa said, turning away from the window, “because I thought you should maybe look at the spell, see if it’s different now that I’m...being pulled by it.”

  “I should have thought of that,” Evon said. “Go ahead and sit down.”

  Kerensa sat on the edge of her bed—there was no chair in the room—and Evon brought the spell into view and froze it. It was glowing more brightly, though not as brightly as the memory of it had in Coreth, and Evon suspected its brightness would increase as they drew closer to the target. She sat very still as he examined it. “There is something different,” he murmured, “but I can’t tell—would you mind standing and turning around?”

  “I feel like a life-sized doll,” she said with a smile, and did as he asked.

  Evon bent to look more closely at the spell-ribbon hovering just above the small of her back. “It’s a new set of runes,” he said, “but it looks familiar, too. I know I’ve seen this kind of configuration before.” He stepped back and rubbed his forehead. There were five or six others that were written this way, all of them impenetrable to decipherment, and now a new one.... “I need to take some notes,” he said, and took her hand and drew her out of the room and down the passage, ignoring the startled noise the guard made when Kerensa, wreathed in blue, went past. In his own room, he rooted through his things for paper and pencil and made a copy of the new runes. He showed it to Kerensa, who’d been craning her neck watching him, then impatiently dismissed epiria so he could see her clearly.

  “What’s the thing around them?” she asked, pointing at a squared-off arc that cradled the runes.

  “Something that binds them so they won’t be used by the other spells. This is—here,” he said, showing her another page. “There are more of these, but I don’t know what they do.”

  “If you turn this one upside down, it looks like a bare tree with two branches, or a T,” she said, rotating the page.

  “And from this angle, this one looks like the old form for the letter F.” Evon snatched the page from Kerensa, then quickly apologized. He rotated the page to several different angles. “They’re not runes, they’re letters,” he exclaimed. “Where did I put—thank you. If they’re all oriented the same way, like this—” he rewrote the symbols in a row—“it says...damn. Gibberish.”

  “No, if you rearrange the symbols, you get the word fathlon,” Kerensa said, snatching the pencil out of Evon’s hand. “I know that word. It means ‘enemy.’”

  “Among other things, yes—”

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s Murakot’s title. In all the oldest stories, he’s Murakot Fathlon.”

  They stared at each other. Evon absently retrieved his pencil. “So what,” he said, “is a name out of Alvorian myth doing in this spell?”

  “You said it was old. Could it be that old? A thousand years?”

  “I don’t see why not, given all the other impossibilities it contains. Including this one. The spell becomes active, and an ancient name for Murakot suddenly appears? It makes no sense.”

  “What if the other ones are names too? Alvor and the rest, maybe?”

  Evon scrabbled through his papers. “You do these. I’ll tackle these ones.”

  Piercy found them that way, seated side by side on Evon’s bed, scribbling and rotating pages. “This is as cozy a scene of domestic intellectuality as I have ever seen. I take it there has been a breakthrough?”

  “Yes, though not quite what I hoped for,” Evon said. “We found names embedded in the spell, and one of them is an old title for Murakot.”

  “So is the spell an Alvorian conspiracist, too?”

  “Unfortunately, no. We were hoping to find Alvor’s name, or his companions’ names, or any names related to the myth, but there’s nothing.”

  “Except we did find names,” Kerensa said, laying down her pencil. “Just nothing we recognize. Leandrie and Minta, Danior and Wadley.”

  “And Haderon,” Evon said. “They at least confirm that the spell is about a thousand years old. People in those days didn’t use surnames, just words indicating where they were from. Like O Dell or Der Lake.”

  “I’m so disappointed. I was really hoping Alvor might’ve had something to do with the spell,” Kerensa said. Then, indignantly, she added, “But I would be so furious if he had!”

  “Some progress is better than nothing, given what little time you may have left, Evon,” Piercy said. “There must be some way to determine to whom those names belong.”

  “What do you mean, what little time?” Kerensa asked.

  Piercy looked at Evon. “You didn’t tell her.”

  “This distracted me.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Evon said, “Miss Elltis has recalled me to the city. I’m to return as soon as the Home Defense magicians arrive here.”

  “What? You can’t go!” Kerensa stood, knocking papers and pencil to the floor.

  “I’ll try not to, but if Home Defense tries to press the issue, I may not have much choice.”

  “I’ll refuse to cooperate,” Kerensa said. “I’ll run away. You already said I was hard to find. I can be even harder to find if I try.”

  “Kerensa—”

  “I’m serious. I absolutely won’t have anything to do with a bunch of magicians who don’t care anything about me except that I’ve got this spell bound up around me. If Mrs. Petelter wants this spell so badly, she’ll have to do as I say.”

  “Kerensa, Mrs. Petelter has no interest in what you want or anything you might have to say,” Piercy said. “She has a task to accomplish and you are nothing more than an obstacle to her getting what she wants. If she has even the slightest notion that you might possibly be considering flight, she will lock you in your room with a guard to watch you at every moment. If you fight her, she will tie you to a chair in that locked room and risk the devastation that will result.”

  “But—” Kerensa’s jaw clenched. “I am
not a thing,” she said. Evon couldn’t tell if she was close to tears or shouting, but her voice was hoarse and her eyes in their too-smooth mask furious.

  “I’m not gone yet,” he said, “and we’re looking for a way for me to stay. Let’s not worry about it until the time comes.”

  “Won’t Miss Elltis notice if you don’t show up soon? Those magicians can’t be more than a day away.”

  “I think I quit her employ yesterday.” Saying it was like a load off his chest he didn’t know he was carrying.

  “You didn’t! Evon....”

  “Not officially. But I do not intend to obey her instructions, which is essentially the same thing.”

  “But—I can’t let you do that!”

  “I know I’ve told you that Evon is the most stubborn man I know,” Piercy drawled. “When he sets his mind to a thing, there is very little short of an act of Gods that can change it. And he has gotten the bit between his teeth with this one.”

  “And I don’t desert my friends,” Evon added, not happy at how Piercy had made him sound. He wouldn’t have left Elltis and Company merely for the sake of an intellectual problem; he was doing it for Kerensa’s sake.

  “Oh, you most certainly desert your friends,” Piercy objected hotly. “You deserted this friend one sweltering summer night ten years ago, when he was unfortunately detained by the housekeeper during a daring raid on the Houndston pantry. She was three inches shorter than I and gave me a hiding that had me standing up for a week.”

  “You certainly whined about it enough. I don’t desert my friends except for Piercy,” Evon said with a smile, but Kerensa didn’t respond in kind. She walked to the window and looked down.

  “It’s like they know where I am,” she said. “They march under these windows too.” She looked back at Evon, her lips trembling. “What next? Piercy loses his position because Mrs. Petelter thinks he isn’t detached enough? At what point do they decide the simplest thing is to cut me apart and see what part of my body this damned spell is tethered to?”

  “Kerensa,” Evon began.

  She cut him off. “None of us has any power over this thing, do we? I’m going to bed now, and I’m going to pray to the Twins that those magicians get permanently lost. Maybe the Gods will listen to me now that I’m in their city. It’s not as if they ever have before.” She pushed past Evon and Piercy to the door. “And I’m not promising I won’t run away. If I do, don’t follow me.” The door slammed behind her.

  Evon walked to the window and leaned on the sill. Below, the Home Defense agents stopped in their paths to speak to one another. By the gestures, one needed to relieve himself. “I’ve already let her down,” he said.

  “You’ve done more for her than anyone else,” Piercy said. “I’ve never seen you come so close to tearing yourself apart over anything like this before.”

  “And it’s not enough.”

  “It’s not over yet, dear fellow.”

  “It is over, Piercy, it was over the minute Miss Elltis told me to return.” Evon went to sit on his bed and covered his eyes with one hand. Then he sighed and stood to gather the papers Kerensa had scattered. “I’m not tired. Do you want me to go to the taproom so you can sleep?”

  “You’ll never be able to concentrate down there. All the Home Defense agents are in there having an argument I’m not sure even they know the purpose of. I can sleep with the light on.” Piercy yawned and began removing his clothes. “Try not to exhaust yourself. We’ll need to make an early start.”

  Evon turned the lamp as low as he could bear it and sat on his bed, spreading out his notes. Knowing that those grouped symbols were names changed his perspective. If these five were names, then the surrounding runes...the names were like signatures, binding the larger parts of the spell. He found a piece of clean paper—he was so tired of looking for paper—and scrawled out the five names. They had to be the magicians who’d created the spell, and he was a fool for not realizing before that a spell of this complexity could never have been devised by only one magician, however powerful the magician. Haderon, creator of the resurrection spell. Minta, creator of Kerensa’s immunity to fire, and Leandrie, responsible for Kerensa’s being drawn to the next victim. And Wadley, whose tangle of runes caused the spell to activate when it reached its victim. What Danior’s work did, Evon wasn’t certain, but it had to be the fire—there was nothing left.

  Now, the word fathlon. Enemy. It had other meanings, but none so accurate. Evon held his notes close to his eyes. He was going to go blind from eyestrain one of these days. There was a marker each name had in common that he was fairly sure indicated a proper noun. If Kerensa was right—and no one knew more about Alvorian myth than she did, he was certain—the word’s appearance in the spell was meant to indicate the Enemy, Murakot. Evon chewed his pencil and made a face at its bitter taste. Murakot. The spell was old enough that it could have been contemporary with him. But even Evon, with his limited knowledge of history, knew that no one had ever attempted to kill Murakot with a spell of this magnitude.

  He needed an expert.

  “Where are you going?” Piercy muttered.

  “I just need to discover something. Go to sleep.” He slipped out of the room and went down the hall to where the guard drowsed in front of Kerensa’s door. The guard came to attention and glowered at him.

  “She’s asleep,” he said.

  “She’s not asleep yet. I need to talk to her.” He reached past the guard to rap on the door.

  “Mrs. Petelter doesn’t approve of hanky-panky,” the guard said.

  “Just talking. No hanky and no panky.” Evon remembered that fall of golden hair and wondered if thinking about running his hands through it met Mrs. Petelter’s definition. He blinked hard to rid himself of the vision. Never mind how attractive she is. You’re supposed to be helping her.

  The door opened a crack. “I need to talk to you,” Evon said to the sliver of Kerensa’s face that was visible. “About Alvor.”

  Kerensa opened the door wider. “Tell me you’re not looking for another bedtime story,” she said.

  “This is important.”

  “All right.” She held the door open for him, then shut it, leaving both of them in darkness. “Don’t move, I’ll get the light,” she said, and after a moment in which she bumped into something and swore softly, light kindled and grew in the lamp beside her bed. Kerensa was in her nightdress and had her hair braided up. She sat on the bed. “Did you learn something?”

  “I hope to. Are there any stories of someone making a spell to kill Murakot?”

  “Is that what you think this spell is?”

  “It’s old and I think you’re right that ‘Fathlon’ in the spell means Murakot. And it’s definitely targeting Fathlon, whoever that is.”

  Kerensa swung her legs up onto the bed and sat with her back against the headboard, her knees pulled up to her chest. “There are no stories like that,” she said. “Nothing like that is even hinted at. Maybe that’s because it’s Alvorian myth, and that would be—I mean, even Dania never made a spell this complicated. So if it’s really meant to kill Murakot, it would have been made by—”

  “—Some magician, or magicians, no one ever heard of,” Evon finished. “But Murakot’s dead, isn’t he? There aren’t any legends about him returning the way there are about Alvor?”

  “Definitely dead,” Kerensa said. “There’s one really gruesome story about what they did to his body that I wish I didn’t know. It was what the Four Talismans were for, to defeat Murakot because he couldn’t be killed by normal means.”

  “If that’s what this spell was for, it would explain why the fire is so potent. I can’t imagine anyone coming back from it. Except—”

  “I know,” Kerensa said tonelessly. “Don’t apologize, Evon, this is just the way things are.”

  Evon sat at the far end of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “You’re as trapped by thi
s as I am, though in your case at least you chose to be here.”

  “I’m not leaving,” he insisted.

  “Even if I tell you to?”

  “Even then.”

  She smiled. “Piercy’s right. You’re too stubborn for your own good.”

  “I hope I’m stubborn enough for your good.” He leaned back against the bedpost. “So why is this spell trying to kill someone who’s a thousand years dead?” he mused. “Tell me about Murakot. What was he like?”

  “Oh...he’s the model for every villain of every melodrama written in the last thousand years. Pure evil. Liked to watch people suffer. Destroyed things just because he could, sometimes even when the destruction went against his own interests. I think he’s the least believable part of the stories. Nobody’s that evil.”

  “Except the Despot,” Evon said, and stopped. They looked at each other. “No, the spell is clearly targeting Murakot, not the Despot. And you said there was no way Murakot could be back from the dead.”

  “Could his soul have been resurrected? No, that was what Wystylth’s Claw was for, to pin Murakot to the Underworld, never to return.”

  “Maybe it means Murakot’s spiritual successor? If he...what did you just think of?”

  Kerensa wore a strange, distant expression. “There is one story,” she said, “but it’s not really part of the lore. The woman who told it to me said it was a late addition to the canon and most people wouldn’t call it Alvorian myth. It was about Murakot and his shadow, or rather his other shadow, because according to this story he had two. One of them was a normal shadow and it did what all shadows do, show the way toward the Gods, because if you can see your shadow then you know which way to turn to face the light. But the other shadow pointed where Murakot was already inclined to go, into dark places, and it taught him strange magics and protected him against his enemies. The story says, when Alvor came to kill Murakot, he had two shadows, but when Murakot was dead, only one remained. It’s sort of a horror story, I think. You know—is Murakot’s shadow still out there, looking for someone new to whisper evil to. I thought it sounded made-up, myself.” She didn’t sound very certain now.